In order to meet the growing demand for internet bandwidth with traffic growth rates around 40-50% per year, telecommunication component providers face the task of increasing the spectral efficiency of fiber utilization. After 10 Gbit/s systems (G−Giga) became successful in the 1990's, solutions for 40 Gbit/s became available in the last years. Standardization and research are now focused on the development of 100 Gbit/s systems with coherent polarisation multiplexed (CP) QPSK being the most likely modulation format for next generation systems. Since polarisation multiplexing utilizes both light polarisations, it is possible to send the signal at a rate of ˜25-28 Gsymbols per second, thus fitting nicely into the standard 50 GHz grid for DWDM (Dense Wavelength Diversity Multiplex) optical systems.
In some applications, like point-to-point radio systems, where polarisation multiplexing is employed, a visual line of sight is given, so that transmitter and receiver polarisations can be aligned during installation, and usually only small variations of the polarisation occurs.
Manually aligning the transmitter and receiver polarisations is not possible for fiber links with time-varying polarisation changes. Other solutions have been proposed for optical fiber systems like polarisation controllers. In fiber optic systems, polarisation changes arbitrarily with time and an adaptive optical polarisation controller is complicated and expensive. Moreover, PDL (polarisation depending loss) leads to a polarisation-dependent attenuation, thereby causing different SNR-levels (signal-to-noise ratio) for the two polarisations.
Since coherent reception also enables the separation of orthogonally polarized signals in the electrical domain, the use of a similar polarisation controller is not needed nor economically viable.
Current fiber network standards do not incorporate training sequences, so that in the receiver the channel has to be estimated blindly without any further knowledge.
E. g. Seb J. Savory, “Digital filters for coherent optical receivers”, Optics Express 16, No. 2, pp. 804-817, 9. January 2008 describes the principles of digital coherent receivers. Savory describes especially blind polarisation demultiplexing by multidimensional digital filtering and compensation of polarisation independent impairments by dispersion compensators and of polarisation dependent impairments by a multidimensional filter referred to as a butterfly filter.
Two algorithms are applied, the LMS (Least Mean Square) algorithm is employed after the carrier phase has been acquired, and the received symbols are compared with ideal symbols in order to derive errors for channel tracking, and the CMA (constant modulus algorithm) that is used for initial acquisition without requiring carrier phase compensation, where the goal is to achieve symbols of equal power. Applying these equalisation algorithms can lead to degenerative solutions, where one polarized signal is demultiplexed to both output polarisations and half of the information lost.